Exemplar of Strength
A 4/4 for two mana is a rate the color should not sell without a receipt, and the entry trigger is the bill. Three -1/-1 counters have to land somewhere in your own ranks the instant the body arrives, so the deployment costs you a slab of board presence up front: drop them on a token, on a creature already running its own counters engine, or on something whose enters-the-battlefield value is spent, and you barely feel it; cast it into an empty board and there is nowhere for the counters to go but the Exemplar's own face, shrinking your 4/4 to a 1/1 before it has thrown a punch. The second clause is the slow walk back: an attack lets you remove one of its own -1/-1 counters, and only when you do does the undersized body climb a step toward its printed stats and pay you a point of life. That is the design's real ask: it wants a builder who already covets -1/-1 counters, because then the entry trigger stops reading as a tax and starts reading as delivery, a way to seed a proliferate plan, feed a wither-and-shrink shell, or fuel a creature that profits from carrying weight. The limit worth naming is that the counters only fall on your side of the board, so this never doubles as removal aimed across the table. It is a sizing puzzle that arrives face-down on your own creatures and spends several combats solving itself.
